Loading…
27
Appreciation post: I picked the boring monthly pantry night over weekly meal drop offs and it worked better for my block
When our church group asked how to help the two apartment buildings on Maple Street after the flood in March, most people voted for weekly hot meal drop offs. I pushed for the opposite, one pantry night a month in the basement of building B, and I lost the vote 14 to 3. So we ran both for a while and the hot meals got 40 plates the first Friday, then 12 by the fourth week. The pantry night started small with 9 families and held steady at 14, and people actually stuck around to talk instead of taking a plate at the door. I think the group liked the feeling of handing someone a warm dinner, but the folks living there wanted to pick their own food and not feel like a charity case every single Friday. We dropped the weekly meals in June and put the money into a $60 Costco run for the pantry instead, and honestly the whole thing got calmer. Has anyone else seen a big volunteer event look great on paper but fizzle out while the small boring one just keeps going?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
karen41010d ago
Gotta be honest, I'm not sure this is the big lesson everyone wants it to be. Forty plates dropping to twelve could just mean the first Friday had a ton of looky-loos and out of town helpers, not that people hated hot meals. And a pantry holding at 14 could just be the same 14 folks who show up for anything free in their own basement. You said yourself the whole thing "got calmer," which mostly sounds like fewer volunteers had to do less work. Maybe the real takeaway is simpler: monthly events are easier to keep going than weekly ones, because weekly anything burns people out. That doesn't mean the pantry model is better, it just means you picked a schedule nobody had to stress about. I'd want to see what happens over a whole year before calling it a win.
5